In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Tim Paige, of LeadPages, about the tactics he’s used to help LeadPages grow to an impressive 40,000 customers, and 170 employees.

Tim Paige is the Senior Conversion Educator at LeadPages and the host of Conversion Cast, a podcast for performance focused marketers. Since joining LeadPages, he has hosted over 400 live webinars and recorded over 100 episodes of his podcast.

Tim shares his journey from door-to-door vacuum salesman to a marketer that helps LeadPages get tens of thousands of customers, and rips apart the systems he used along the way. We learn about a different approach to the 80/20 rule and why there’s another hidden rule there that’s just as important.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Kate Erickson of the fantastic Entrepreneur on Fire.

Kate’s talking to us about how her content helped propel EOFire to one of the biggest podcasts ever made, and how she’s about to do it all over again with her new blog, Kate’s Take. Kate lets us in on her marketing processes for creating high quality, actionable resources and how she makes damn well sure these resources are a perfect market fit.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Chris Ducker – virtual CEO, keynote speaker and best selling author.

Chris Ducker became one of the best-known British businesspeople when he popularized the idea of virtual teams. Mostly every company has VAs these days, but back in 2009, they weren’t readily available. When Chris suffered a shattering burnout, he reinvented himself as a virtual CEO and started to replace himself in his business.

With all of the experience gained, he then set up Virtual Staff Finder — a service where CEOs in need of virtual team members can go to hire VAs that have been thoroughly screened and trained before being accepted into the program. Virtual Staff Finder has linked 4300 virtual team members to companies and expanded to the point where Chris now has over 400 employees.

Chris knows that a solid team is the most important part of any business — especially if the CEO is going to stay sane. 

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Steli Efti, CEO of Close, a sales and CRM platform.

Listening to Steli Efti is like soaking in the most intense sales wisdom you’ll ever hear.

He’s a born salesman, and this interview is full of his detailed processes and quick-fire tips. From building, scaling and maintaining a sales team to generating outbound sales leads and closing deals, Steli lets us in on techniques that have helped him build the successful Close from (surprise surprise) an outbound sales service to a CRM.

He explains his “AQC” model for measuring the effectiveness of outbound sales, and how many cold calls you need to make every day to get results. I really loved hearing about testing whether it’s your leads that aren’t qualified or whether your sales pitch just sucks.

Use the links below to get the episode!

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

Quote to Tweet

“Qualify, pitch, manage objections then go for the close. It’s a process, not rocket science” (tweet this)

Show notes

• Steli reveals best practices and processes for building a killer sales team
• What types of companies should bother implementing a sales team
• Why Close don’t do outbound sales any more
• Setting up an inbound sales machine
• When to set up a sales team, and when not to
• Using outbound sales as market research and pure hustle
• Getting your first customer with outbound sales
• A solid framework for outbound sales explained
• Estimating the actual lifetime value of a customer to see if you need a sales team
• Back-of-the-napkin math for calculating the cost of outbound sales
• When it’s okay to pay $2 to get $1 back
• A quick trick you can use to make outbound sales way more profitable
• Identifying your ideal customer, and judging how hard it will be to implement outbound sales to go after them
• The most overlooked ground rule of outbound sales
• How to answer the question “does this scale?”
• What to do when you run out of leads
• Matching ideal customers to lead sources to reel in the best targets
• Why trusting bought leads is pure stupidity and manual scraping is much more accurate
• The types of professionals that are the easiest to sell to
• A rarely used method of generating sales leads
• You’ve got leads. What now?
• Implementing a system to get consistent demos, meetings and sales
• Planning out a month of sales activity in advance
• The importance of testing constantly: emails, cold calls, offers.
• Why 99.9% of outbound campaigns are high volume
• What does ‘high volume’ mean? How many cold calls or emails is that per day?
• Developing a minimum viable pitch
• Overcoming the fear of sales
• The most important outbound sales metrics to track when cold calling and emailing
• Calculating your “reach rate” to measure your sale team’s effectiveness
• The simple way to find out if a lead is qualified
• Finding out if your leads are the problem, or if your pitch just sucks
• Creating a list of common objections to close more deals
• Why you should follow up forever

Show links

TOOLS

• Close: https://close.com
• Close Blog: https://blog.close.com
• Elastic Sales: http://elasticsales.com/
• Process Street: https://www.process.st

CONTACT

• Steli Efti: [email protected] & @steli
• The Startup Chat: http://thestartupchat.com

In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Hack the Entrepreneur’s Jon Nastor about starting a podcast and getting 1,400,000 downloads. 

Podcaster Jon Nastor has been host of Hack the Entrepreneur (HTE) since 2015, and between then and now his podcast has quickly become a runaway success.

From a few tentative early episodes to 1.4 million downloads, HTE has exploded. How did Jon do it?

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When starting a new business whether it be a tech company or a retail store you will have many challenges that you will need to face and conquer. Starting a new business has many challenges on its own but when you’re looking to scale many of these challenges will be new to you and you will be unsure on how to face them. They can range from Customer Profiling to Investor Pitching and when your startup begins to scale there are challenges such as onboarding processes that you will need to know to ensure your company runs as smooth as possible.

That’s why over here at Process Street we created the checklists within this startup processes post, to ensure you are one-step ahead when faced with these challenges.

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Zapier’s Alison Groves about growing a tech startup to 1,000,000 users.

Want to grow your software company to 1,000,000 users? In this episode the Business Systems Explored podcast, we speak to Alison Groves, the Partner Marketing Manager at Zapier, and find out exactly how she did it.

Zapier is an intuitive automation platform that connects your SaaS apps together. In the beginning, Zapier was doing cold outreach to software giants like Salesforce, asking them if they could build integrations for their platform. Now, there are over 500 Zapier partners — Process Street included — and that’s because of the partner marketing work Alison has been a part of.

For a business that survives on the cooperation of other businesses, Zapier has quickly shot up the ranks and become the go-to platform for connecting apps that don’t have native integrations.

How did they forge such great relations with so many big companies? Listen to the episode to get the growth strategy they used.

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When he started investing, Chris Sacca told himself, “F*ck it… I’m just not going to play this traditionally anymore.”

And as any Shark Tank fans out there know, Sacca is anything but traditional. From his cowboy shirt uniform to his self-described “colorful language,” the billionaire Lowercase Capital founder is constantly finding ways to shake up traditional conventions of a venture capitalist. Except one.

Quirks aside, Sacca follows one of the oldest VC rules in the book: always have a process. Every investor has a set of questions they ask themselves and rules they follow when weighing an investment decision. For Peter Thiel, it’s the ability to get a monopoly. For Social Capital, it’s the ability to transform society. Chris Sacca’s rules are a bit more varied — but just as stringent.

Following these rules has allowed Sacca to place hugely successful bets on early stage companies, on and off reality television. His impressive portfolio includes the likes of Uber, Slack, Stripe, and Twitter, and it’s all due to this process.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Walter Chen — the CEO and co-founder of lightweight status reporting platform, iDoneThis.

Walter lets us in on some little-known secrets, busts a number of misleading marketing myths and shares some unexpected tactics that helped him get ahead.

The episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, you’ll learn startup marketing strategy from an experienced content marketer who — by any means necessary — pushed iDoneThis to $500k ARR. He says it’s okay for 90% of your content to fail, tell us the kinds of marketing emails you shouldn’t bother sending, and a trick he used to leverage the fanatical readership of Hacker News.

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You need a solid writing app.

It’s vital for practically every kind of company—whether it’s for drafting contracts, writing up website content, or just putting together internal documentation.

But team collaboration can easily become a huge nuisance.

The more people involved, the more difficult it can be to decide on the right edits and produce a coherent piece. That means the last thing you want is even more trouble dealing with a collaboration tool that doesn’t fit your workflow.

We delved into the features of three popular collaborative writing apps—Quip, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs—to help you decide upon which is best for your team.

In this post, we’re going to compare each app’s features in the fields of:

• Sharing
• Concurrent editing
• Revision history
• Chatting and commenting
• Organization

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